Claria/Gator's EULA

[Scarecrow Man]

There is an interesting article at Ben Edelman's site. He has written about his examination of Claria/Gator's end user license agreement (EULA). I know how that sounds but it is actually very interesting.

The first thing he points out is the fact that the license agreement is extraordinarily difficult to read, if you happen to be the one person out of 10,000 who actually reads an EULA. Assuming it is readable at all (that's not always the case apparently), often it is presented in a very small portion of a small scroll box. The reader is forced to scroll several dozen times to read the entire agreement.

If you persevere and manage to read Claria/Gator's EULA, you'll find one clause that prohibits a user from viewing or recording the network traffic between Claria/Gator's software and their web servers. That is a particularly odd thing to put into a software license. I wonder what it is Claria/Gator has to hide from their users?

Another section demands that you not remove or encourage the removal of the software in any way other than going to add/remove. Claria/Gator seems to be forbidding the use of antispyware tools.

Uh huh. And I demand that you close my newsletter only by setting fire to your computer while baying at the moon. If you close it in any other way, you are in violation of my policy.

I wonder if anyone from Claria/Gator is reading this?

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